Gravity measurement at the sub-millimeter scale with optical lattice clock

Abstract

Due to the excellent accuracy, the optical lattice clock (OLC) has not only achieved impressive results in frequency measurement but also gradually plays an important role in quantum precision measurement. In this paper, we propose a scheme for measuring gravity at the sub-millimeter scale extracted from the Rabi spectrum based on Super-Bloch oscillations of atoms in the OLC. Our proposal can be realized on the existing OLC platform without significant change. Under realistic existing experimental parameters of 87Sr OLC, we determine the optimal experimental conditions and obtain a sensitivity of 5μGal/Hz in the quantum projection noise limit, which is 50 times better than the previous method at the sub-millimeter scale under the same consideration. Another advantage of our proposal is that it is insensitive to the noise of the lattice laser, which contributes to the major uncertainty of the previous measurement (PRA 86, 033615). Our research will promote the development of OLC geoscopy.